Sleight of Hand
by Missez Ventimiglia
Summary: Three o'clock in the morning is the perfect time for anger, doubt and selfhate. RoryLogan post 6.16. Complete.
1. Handle With Care

**Sleight of Hand**

Disclaimer: I don't own _Gilmore Girls_, nor am I George Orwell. There's a GG reference you may recognize in here.

A/N: This is part one of a two-piece set dealing with Rory and Logan post "Bridesmaids Revisited", and completely just my projections because I don't read spoilers. The second part will be from Logan's perspective. Italics indicate flashbacks.

It is three o'clock in the morning and Rory can't sleep. She lies completely still on her bed, for fear of even the slightest noise waking Paris, who would immediately employ her self-defense skills and Rory is currently not in the mood to fend off a saucepan-brandishing roommate.

It is hard to hold onto strength born only out of anger and humiliation, and all that keeps her from breaking down is her pride. A week has gone by since Honor's wedding and she is alone with her self-hate, her foolish belief that love made you happy. She recalls bitterly that she had told her mother only a few weeks ago that she thought Logan might be The One. Now, she knows that he's not interested in One and Onlys, that she was an idiot to ask him to have a real relationship. (And yet it was always him who was unable to let her go, but she will not think of this, she doesn't want to dilute her anger with grief.)

Humiliated is an accurate description of how she still feels. She can't bear to be made ridiculous and her face burns red at the thought of all of Honor's friends casually discussing who had had sex with Logan more often, their smiles of false sympathy and real contempt when they realized she was Logan's girlfriend. Suddenly her dress had seemed ugly and the room far too small, as she was exposed as a little girl playing dress up, someone not yet grown up enough for their world.

Restlessly, she turns over and then freezes, afraid that Paris will hear her and demand to know why she should have to suffer just because Rory's love life is in a shambles. Paris is still angry with Doyle, so it takes even less than usual to set her off. Rory's thoughts turn from Doyle to the paper to Logan. (Of course.) She has spent a great deal of time this week imagining different scenarios that could occur when she sees him: she could throw her coffee in his face; ignore him; lie blatantly and say that she had tons of men on the side, too; be more mature than she feels and have a civil conversation; or run away (a personal favourite). Everything seems to bring her back to Logan. She closes her eyes, willing herself to think of anything - the Oscars, the seemingly endless supply of 'I wish I could quit you' jokes - anything but the person who had helped her bear this year of not talking to her mother, of dropping out of Yale, of the disappointment she had seen in everyone's eyes, of a sudden lack of direction after years of knowing exactly what she was going to do.

He lied to her. He lied and then acted as if it wasn't his fault at all, and it doesn't matter that she's lied before, that she's cheated, that she had sex with someone else's husband, because she didn't know it hurt like this; she didn't know.

"I didn't cheat on you because we were broken up!"

"_He was my boyfriend first!"_

(She is sorry now. She has been sorry ever since Lindsey picked up the phone. Sorry sorry sorry. Why had she ever thought sorry was enough?)

It doesn't matter that hearing Logan say _I love you_, the words tentative because he has never said them to another girl, slows her heartbeat and makes tears prick in her eyes. It doesn't matter that she misses him already and that she's never been good at moving on (witness the three times she tried with Dean), because she's stupid and pathetic. All that matters is the buzzing in her head that has been there for a week, ever since Honor's wedding, senseless white noise that won't leave her alone.

She tries to remember him, angry and drunk, yelling at her in the bar after Jess left, throwing money on the table, because that's good, who would miss someone like that? Who would love someone like that? Instead, unbidden, another more recent memory surfaces: the way Logan looked at her before the panel when he told her she was beautiful and to knock 'em dead. At the time, she thought she saw love and pride in his eyes and it had washed over her: a wave of happiness, and a sense of things falling into place. It scares her now, this idea that she might need him to be whole. She rejects the notion immediately; after all, she's a self-sufficient, educated woman in the twenty-first century, her sense of completeness shouldn't rest with anyone other than herself.

She begins to list her favourite authors in reverse alphabetical order, but that doesn't work, just like listing the major newspapers in the world didn't work. Nothing works, so Rory lies awake with this cocktail of doubt, anger and pain that, instead of making her drowsy, renders her unable to sink into the oblivion of sleep.

--

_Her perfectionism tends to catch up with her at night; at 1 a.m., she sits on a couch in what she still forgets is their apartment, red pen behind her ear and yellow highlighter in hand as she edits articles for the _Daily News. _Logan comes in the door, fresh from a talk with his father and as she greets him she notices the set of his shoulders and the anger lurking in his eyes. She won't press him now, but she will ask him later, try to make him feel better. His glance moves over the living room, strewn with papers and textbooks, and he smirks. _

"_Ace. You're like the horse in Animal Farm – and you know how he ended up."_

_She matches his light tone and asks, "Are you going to send me to the slaughterhouse?"_

"_The thought has crossed my mind. I know the intrigues of various faculty members are fascinating and that it would be a shame to deprive people of the latest concert review, but it's one in the morning. I have no desire to deal with a cranky Rory in the morning."_

"_I'll have you know, I'm never cranky. I'm a personal ray of sunshine in the lives of all who know me. Birds dress me in the morning."_

_Logan finally persuades her to come to bed and she acquiesces after muttering that she bet Doyle understood when Paris stayed up all night on paper business. He replies that he is perfectly happy with where his knowledge of Paris and Doyle's home life sits – at nothing. She laughs; after more than two years with Paris as a roommate, it almost feels like _she_'s sleeping with Doyle, too. Logan's face is priceless: complete horror and disgust. _

_Laughing, she remarks, "And on that note, sweet dreams." _

_In bed, she glances at him next to her, his torso bare. His shoulders are her favourite part of his anatomy: broad and smooth and lightly tanned. She is comfortable here, with him; he makes her feel both secure and excited, and it is a tantalizing combination. Logan is saying something, but she missed it and only utters a sleepy "Hmm?" He smiles and brushes her hair off her face as her eyelids grow increasingly heavy; it is moments like this when she believes that he really does love her, when it's not hard to tag the word 'forever' to the picture the two of them make, limbs entwined on Logan's king size bed. _

_Rory mumbles a sleepy thanks but before she can tell him for what (for being him, for being there), she is asleep._

--

In the morning, she will think that it is surely tears of anger that have left her pillow wet.


	2. So Pull Another Rabbit Out of Your Hat

**Sleight of Hand**

_Chapter 2: So Pull Another Rabbit Out of Your Hat_

**Disclaimer:** I don't have the talent of an Amy Sherman-Palladino or an E.E. Cummings. I'm just borrowing.

A/N: Still post 6.16 but for the purposes of this fic, Rory and Logan were broken up for longer than thirty seconds.

--

A year ago, at three o'clock in the morning, Logan would have been out somewhere, drinking and partying and generally enjoying himself. Tonight, he lies alone in a bed that feels empty, trying to calm the voices in his head long enough to let him go to sleep.

He would have a nightcap, except that he's trying not to drink. It's not out of a sudden desire to experience life sober all the time, but rather the awareness that if he starts drinking, he doesn't know when he'll stop. It would be easy to fall into a stupor caused by alcohol, to pretend that this past week has been nothing but a conjuring trick created by an especially malicious magician. At three o'clock in the morning, however, it's harder to lie to yourself than it is during the day. Shadows take on a life of their own, and he knows he won't get out of paying for his stupid decisions.

Logan has had nothing but time to think about the last time he saw Rory. Colin and Finn have offered drinks, long games of poker, and the chance to meet beautiful girls, but he has turned them down, preferring instead to sulk by himself. Pity party for one, indeed.

At first, Rory's anger had seemed excessive. They were _broken up_, for God's sake. It turned out that, according to Rory, he had been on a break by himself, but wasn't that all just semantics? They had had a fight – she couldn't dispute that – in which he had brought great glory to the Huntzberger name by yelling at his girlfriend in a random bar, and had parted angrily, after which they hadn't spoken for a few weeks. It sounded like breaking up to him, but he's not exactly a veteran of long-term relationships. The weakness of his excuse had been driven home when he was finally able to escape into his room in the hotel after Honor's wedding; he had gone over it again in his head, freeze-framing that image of Rory right before she walked out, as proud and stiff as Emily Gilmore herself could be, and made himself see past the anger and disbelief to the devastation in her eyes.

Love is not a commodity that is priced very highly in the circles his family frequents. Lust, secret affairs, hushed up scandals, yes: they break the monotony. But love? Too unpredictable, too liable to blow up in your face.

He is pretty damn sure that he gave her too much of himself, let her get too close, and now it's come back to bite him in the ass. What was it his father used to tell him? Only invest in sure things? Thanks, Dad; lesson learned, don't let it happen again. It's a little too late to fall back on his father's advice and, worst of all, Logan can't bring himself to regret anything he shared with Rory.

He knows that she has gone to Stars Hollow for a few days and is emailing her articles to the _Daily News_. He dismisses the option of enlisting Lorelai's help almost before he thinks it; if she hated him before, he can only bet that she's trying to find a guillotine with his name on it now. This time, there is no conveniently in trouble newspaper to save. Being a hero won't be enough to get Rory back again and he doesn't even bother considering flowers, coffee carts and fruit baskets. She's not going to forgive him based on his same old tricks.

He doesn't know how to convince Rory that it was all a mistake, stupid decisions based on the dangerous combination of alcohol, loneliness and familiarity. He doesn't know how to explain that they were all just attempts to rid himself of the taste of ashes in his mouth.

Thanksgiving was supposed to have been his epiphany: a sudden realization, full of bright white lights, that he couldn't go back to having sex with a string of girls whose names he knew but not how they took their coffee or the colour of their eyes (the bluest he's ever seen). It was like that stupid saying about how after trying fine wine you can't go back to the bottles with the screwed on caps. (Not that he would know, since the price of the wine he drinks runs into four digits). He can rail against God, or fate, or whomever, but what keeps him awake is the knowledge that the fact that one side of the bed is conspicuously empty is all his fault.

--

_Logan is stuck in a meeting with his father that is running past midnight and he has to stifle the urge to yawn. Mitchum is explaining the finer details of some business deal or other, pointedly mentioning how it almost fell through because of Logan's desire to "play house with his little girlfriend". He wants to tell his father to go to hell - Dante's preferably- but the words get stuck in his mouth, weighed down by family obligation and duty, by the knowledge that the life he lives depends on his father's goodwill. And let's face it, he has no desire to suddenly have to work, or drive his own car. This is the only life he's ever known._

_He leaves the office tense and angry, rubbing his temples tiredly. It's getting harder not to let his father's expectations affect him now that they could affect someone else, too. He reaches their apartment at one a.m. and tries to muffle the soft _'_click'_ _of the door closing because he assumes Rory is asleep. Instead, there she is, wide awake and working. He's starting to understand her organizing system (she has insisted there is an order to the way the textbooks are strewn about) and he smirks. _

"_Ace. You're like the horse in Animal Farm – and you know how he ended up."_

_Her smile is gentle and understanding as she keeps the conversation light. She's better at reading him then he would have once been comfortable with, but right now, all he feels is sheer relief that here is someone who apparently loves him for himself. She pauses, extending a silent invitation to unburden himself to her, and he will, soon, but not tonight. It is enough for now that he finally understands how a house can be a haven. _

_Logan knows that Rory has completely lost track of time, so he reminds her that sleep is more important than correcting articles about the intrigues of various faculty members. Eventually, she acquiesces, and they head into their bedroom. He was right: Rory is practically falling asleep on her feet, but it is the good kind of tired, the one that goes along with a feeling of accomplishment. They slip into bed and she turns her body towards his, pale skin against tanned, as he says something about his plans for the next day to which her only response is an "Hmm?" He brushes the hair off her face and she mumbles something incoherent, teetering on the precipice between sleep and waking._

_Her eyes drift shut as Logan looks at her, subconsciously noting the way she isn't afraid to let him see her like this, in all her "intense fragility". Lightly, he brushes his lips against hers, a silent 'good night' or perhaps something else. He feels a little lightheaded, but he can't blame it on alcohol, because he didn't drink tonight. (Anyway, by now, it takes a lot of liquor to make him tipsy.) It is a surge of something he can't quite grasp, a desire to protect her mixed in with a wish to give her the world. It is still relatively new, this feeling of someone else's happiness determining his own, and it unsettles him, so he lies there, arm draped loosely around Rory, until the sound of her breathing lulls him to sleep. _

--

This is the real epiphany: that being in a relationship is another type of risk, different from the Life and Death Brigade. Without Rory, his senses are dulled and he hates the idea of just going through the motions. She will never be just another girl, not to him, and this is what Logan will tell her. He doesn't want to entertain the possibility that that might not be enough. For tonight, he will let his exhausted mind play its hopeful tricks; he will let himself believe that Rory still loves him, impossible as it may seem.


End file.
